It is Trump (and you!) who seem determined to insist that the crowd size matters, not me.

I think you’re the one who’s trying to sell something, and it might help if you don’t step on your dick.

When you’re in the middle of trying to sell the idea that the quality of a leader can be judged by the size of the crowd he can raise, it might help if you don’t shoot your own foot off.

I just heard a long documentary on NPR about two Polish Holocaust survivors of the Nazi camps. Just before that they had a review of a new book on the American slave trade. You don’t have to go into medieval times to see unbelievable cruelty, organized on an industrial scale.

The Soviet Gulags, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Balkan ethnic cleansing…the list goes on and on and on…

And we are not immune. What we did to the Red Indians was no different, just safely back in the mist of history where we can’t see it too clearly from our comfortable present.

And we don’t dare blame our horrors on evil religions or ideologies or dictatorships. Every rapist, every schoolyard bully, every crooked cop or ghetto thug, drug dealer, gun merchant or outlaw motorcycle gang represents a bottomless well or unspeakable horror. And so does the crisp, impeccably dressed and groomed executive in his tastefully appointed suite. We don’t need supernatural demons or alien monsters to give us fear and horror, its in our DNA. We’re a hideous species, not because we are violent or cruel. Nature, after all, is violent and cruel. We are worse because we enjoy it.

Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history’s forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (in “the Lion in Winter”).

I struggled with that somewhat, especially in studying the middle ages. They often engaged in activities we’d consider unforgivably cruel. I won’t recount any of them here, but I couldn’t help but wonder: how could any human being not understand how brutal and awful those things were?

I think when future generations look at our time–the late 20th and early 21st centuries–I bet many of them will similarly struggle…how, they may ask, could those people have sat on their hands while watching the climate change? And now, we can add to that question: how could those idiots have handed the keys to the kingdom to such an ignorant, petty narcissist?

We will not be remembered kindly.

Edit: with time comes perspective, and my thoughts about medieval cruelty have morphed. The modern era has seen no reduction of our ability to visit hardship and cruelty on each other, making the past look pastoral and quaint in comparison. Would that the medieval mind could regard the 20th century, it would probably be aghast.

The political philosophies that led up to Trump; the racism, nationalism, nativism, populism, chauvinism, militarism, and religious and economic fundamentalism, have to bring us to the point of death before we finally understand how destructive they are to human freedom. And the biggest ism of all is fascism, by whatever name it is currently disguised.

This is what was required in Germany and Japan after the War and the Allied Occupation. Those societies almost collapsed before the major roots of these anti-human ideologies were finally yanked out and recognized by those peoples as the malignant growths they really were. Russia and China never successfully made the transition after the Cold War. They eventually relapsed into the same disease, with the same symptoms, just a different diagnosis.

Hopefully, war and occupation will not be necessary here–you could even argue that our occupation is underway right now. But we must prepare ourselves for a long period of national suffering before this plague finally runs its course.

Feed a cold and starve a fever. There is no magic medicine, and we have no guarantee we will survive.

Goebbels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlV3oQ3pLA0